Update VCFe 23.0 has been postponed until September 7th due to issues with the building. Save the date! The 23th annual European Vintage Computer Festival will take place on 7./8. September 2024 ! And of course there can be no VCFe without Steckschwein. This time is special, as we first presented the humble beginnings of our (then nameless) favourite homebrew computer at VCF 15.0 in 2014. So this year not only marks the 10th anniversary of the Steckschwein, but also the 10th anniversary of the VCFe being “home” of the Steckschwein.

To share my fascination for the numerous sorting algorithm videos on youtube, I took some sorting algorithm examples in C from https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/sorting and visualized them using our BGI compatible C graphics library (more about that later). The algorithms shown are: Bubble Sort Cocktail shaker Sort Gnome Sort Insertion Sort Comb Sort Heap Sort Shell Sort Selection Sort Quick Sort Merge Sort Radix Sort The code examples from https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/sorting are only slightly adapted and could be compiled with cc65 almost instantly.

Some time ago we introduced a tiny tool called ppmview.prg in our collection of tools and progs for our Steckschwein. The ppmview.prg, as the name already tells, is able to load an image in ppm (Portable BitMap) format with a maximum size of 256x212px and displays it on the screen. The first version of ppmview was released in 2018 and since then we just use the SCREEN 8 (MSX) also known as graphic mode 7 (RGB).

Niklaus Wirth has died on 1.1.2024 at the age of 89. Known to most as the creator of the programming language Pascal, Wirth was also primary designer of the programming languages Euler, PL360, ALGOL W, Modula, Modula-2 and Oberon, heavily influencing coming languages and the paradigm of object oriented programming, and programming methodology altogether. Furthermore, he led the team designing the Lilith workstation, a graphical workstation with a bitmapped graphical display, heavily influenced by the Xerox Alto.

In order to fill the void in the days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve 2013, we began experimenting with a 65C02 on a breadboard. This little experiment would later evolve into an actually working 8bit computer. 10 years and some significant amount of focus creep later we had build this cool little 8bit machine with the specifications found here. The amount of new stuff to learn to design a new computer out of “old” or “retro” components was massive.